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Become a Local Summer Sensation

Attracting Customers with Online Kid-Friendly Promotions  

As summer approaches, it’s essential to plan and create special bundles and promotions that will attract families to your bowling center. By incorporating vibrant and fun advertising that reflects your promotions, you can grab the attention of potential customers and set your center up for success. Utilize your Web Reservations and Kiosk Platform to effectively promote your upcoming offerings and make it convenient for customers to book their visits. By staying creative and planning, you can keep your offerings fresh, exciting, and exclusive, ultimately encouraging customers to return for more fun and memorable experiences at your bowling center. 

Bundle it up! Consider offering bundle deals with themed items such as coloring sheets featuring characters from your bowling games, contests, and unique experience combinations to appeal to kids and parents alike. Creating a fun and kid-friendly food and beverage item, such as a Bowling Themed Quesadilla, is a fun way to include a Food and Beverage item with your kid-friendly offerings. By adding creative touches like cutting out three holes to resemble a bowling ball, you can make a regular menu item more appealing and engaging for kids. 

You can also consider bundling this special food item with a unique experience, such as changing the center’s vibe to cater to younger bowlers during designated days throughout the summer. This could include playing kid-friendly and upbeat music, hosting contests, and offering incentives like filling a card up per visit with a sticker or stamp to complete the boxes for a free item on their next visit. By offering a customized and engaging experience, you can encourage customers to return to your center and create a memorable and enjoyable outing for families. 

Aside from the typical year-round offerings, if you haven’t previously offered a healthy option on Web or Kiosk for parents and kids who love a variety of foods, you could be deterring customers who require or prefer those items from spending additional time in your center. Adding a healthy food option such as a grain and vegetable bowl with toppings the customer can hand select when ordering through Kiosk can be a helpful addition. Combining an item like this with a fun name such as “Let’s Go Bowl-ing” or creating different bowl combinations with fun names can be a new way to create additional revenue easily within your regular kitchen items. 

Consult with your kitchen crew or team members to see if someone has a fun idea to implement in the center’s kid-friendly food and beverage offerings for summer. Team members with a listening ear may have heard repeat requests they can pass along while you are in your planning phase. Consider creating some ways to showcase these items through Web Reservations with some value pricing or bundled deals for parents where they can plan, reserve and check-in right at the Kiosk to begin their experience. 

It’s important to communicate your offerings to your customers on all your platforms. If you are hoping to expand and offer more ideas like these, you might be interested in our Virtual Marketing Manager Program where we take a deep dive with you into your center’s marketing to assist you in following through on ideas or goals as well as refreshing your spaces online to ultimately drive additional business to your center.  Request additional information now

Leveraging the Craze

When looking for marketing ideas sometimes hopping on the hype of new movies like the Barbie Movie not only creates a platform for fun promotions but takes advantage of what everyone’s talking about and what’s being featured nationwide.  Taking a trip to your local movie theater might be the key to your next big idea.   When the new blockbuster hit is out it becomes “the buzz…the craze”!  The news is covering record box office numbers, while society is having a little fun and dressing the part and gathering with friends to celebrate the movie experience together.  The movie is featured everywhere…on apparel, selfie props, merchandise, and people are dressing the part of the characters and posting on their social media. The movies raking in the most money are the ones that can be leveraged to draw that excitement and enthusiasm into the center.   Why not capitalize on this in your center? The Barbie Movie is currently playing in theaters and is being talked about everywhere. Does anyone else think a Barbie Night or a Pink Theme event could get customers excited? Sometimes coming up with ideas for an event like this can be tough but don’t forget to reach out to your staff for ideas. Sometimes your staff will come back with ideas that will blow your mind.   Remember this isn’t a one-time opportunity. Once the Barbie movie has come and gone there will be many more hits that attract kids and adults. Almost yearly a superhero or animation franchise movie comes out and that is also a perfect time to capitalize on the hype. This doesn’t have to just be a movie thing. This can work with the hottest tv shows and with whatever current sport is going on. I know staff always enjoys when they can wear their favorite team’s jersey to work. The ideas are endless when it comes to events that you can host to bring in customers.   Sometimes these ideas aren’t easy to come up with and you just need a little seed planted in your head to help kickstart your ideas. This would be the perfect time to check out the Seeds Of Success Podcast. Weekly,  Dottie and Orly release a show that plants those seeds for you to grow into money making ideas for your center The show is now available on your favorite podcast platforms, or you can check out our Linktree to listen and subscribe or follow our other Beyond the Frame social media channels.

A FEW IDEAS TO HELP LEVERAGE THE BLOCKBUSTER MOVIE CRAZE

  • Host a themed bowling night, week, day, or month.
    • Create the atmosphere with a custom created light show. (In the case of the Barbie Movie create a totally pink atmosphere)
    • Encourage guests to come dressed as their favorite character of the movie or show and get a special offer or official swag.
    • Consider unique colored pins for a “Get A Strike for Barbie” promotion (or other movie character).
    • Offer character themed food and beverages.
  • Setup a themed Selfie Booth that is co-branded with your center logo.  The Barbie Movie has adorable Barbie and Ken boxes that are readily available online.  Have movie or character related props available for guests to be creative and have fun with the experience.
  • Get social media-savvy. Use social media to promote your themed events and promotions.  Tag the movie or show in posts and use relevant hashtags.
  • Have a costume contest.
  • Play themed music and videos in the center.
  • Allow staff to wear themed apparel to work and offer a prize for the most creative.  Let the employees experience the fun too.
  • Partner with local movie theatre to offer cross promotion opportunities.  Display movie promotional cutouts or run movie trailers on televisions and monitors or provide a special offer for movie goers with their ticket stub in return for movie tickets for staff.

TIPS TO HELP YOU SUCCEED

  • Plan early.  Establish a relationship with local theatres and gain knowledge of upcoming potential hits in advance.  Start by planning your marketing and promotional activities early so that you’re ready to take advantage of the hype when the movie is released.
  • Be creative.  Don’t be afraid to involve the entire staff and have fun with the planning and execution.
  • Measure your results.   It’s important to track your results so you can see what’s working and what is not working.  This will help fine-tune the marketing and promotion so the results will be even better next time.

Don’t be afraid to take advantage of national hype of movies or the latest craze.  It’s clear to see that people just want to have fun!!

HELPFUL SITES

Movie Insider This is a great resource and has great filtering capabilities to assist in keeping in the know.

IDMB Browse this site to find out everything you want to know about movies and tv shows.

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